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This is how doomed teenager Ashley Smith came to rack up a custodial sentence that totaled a staggering 2,299 days — more than six years — owing on the get-out-of-jail ledger by the time of her utterly preventable death on Oct. 19, 2007.

What had begun with a youth sentence of 30 days for throwing a crab apple at a postman faded to black in a segregation cell at the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener, with a ligature tied around her neck, while guards did absolutely nothing to intervene — because those were the orders for dealing with this incorrigible, self-harming girl.

Of the 70 infractions that Ashley committed, upwards of 50 occurred while in custody for such offences as spitting at guards and assaulting other inmates. Each time, with barely any legal defence mounted, the hammer dropped and the incarceration period was extended, daylight dimming as Ashley’s prospects for release grew ever distant.

At the end, she was exhausted, hopeless and maddened, the damage she inflicted upon herself reflexive — the only tool remaining for the attention she desperately sought. A way to say: I’m still here, look at me. Somebody?

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The woeful saga, Ashley’s punishments, can be quantified. A cold record of violations and punitive reckonings has been neatly collated, because that’s what institutions do best —keep track of the paper and the electronic trail, their institutional auditing. But the physical and psychological hurt heaped on that poor girl — evidence that perpetrators long fought to keep under wraps — is only now emerging in its totality.

A repeatedly derailed coroner’s inquest finally settled in on Monday, five jurors sworn, for what will be a public examination of Ashley’s life and death, likely to last for months.

This exhaustive process will do nothing for Ashley, of course, nor bring to justice any individual who contributed to the teen’s fate. One alleged culprit, a Saskatchewan guard charged with assault, was acquitted. Another effort at criminal accountability — the guards present when Ashley died — never got past the preliminary inquiry stage. And it required scolding from no less a figure than Prime Minister Stephen Harper to force Correctional Service Canada into backing off interminable legal machinations aimed at limiting the scope of the coroner’s inquest — dodging that contributed to a massive $3.6-million tab billed by lawyers to the Department of Justice, which means Canada’s taxpayers.

All to keep a lid on the scandalizing gang-up — pre and post-mortem — against a 19-year-old girl.

“We cannot now reverse the course of history,’’ presiding coroner Dr. John Carlisle told the jurors in his opening preamble. “What is done is done. This is the best memorial we can give to Ashley.’’

So that there might never again be another Ashley, another similar tragedy, another towering discredit to the system that so ruined that teenager.

It is next to nothing. By legislation, a coroner’s inquest can’t attribute blame. It can only help illuminate what happened and deliver recommendations to prevent reoccurrence. Coroner’s motto: We speak for the dead to protect the living.

This jury will watch Ashley die.

That dreadful episode exists on videotape from surveillance cameras at Grand Valley.

It will hear from upwards of a hundred witnesses.

More than 8,000 pages of documentary evidence will be presented. On Monday, the jurors were sent home after lunch to read-in from a 2008 report written by the New Brunswick child advocate, a dismaying account of Smith’s time in youth custody before she transferred to the adult system.

Ashley came of age behind bars, but she never really grew up, never matured beyond the youthful rebellion that was a precursor — indeed, in retrospect, an adolescent manifestation — of mental illness encroaching, hardening into pathology when incarcerated. It’s past knowing whether Ashley could have been delivered from her demons had she received proper treatment, even just a bit of tenderness rather than abuse, indignities, restraints, threats from nasty correctional nurses, a spit-sack double-bagged over her head, and the pacifying injections to numb her into compliance.

A penitentiary is no place for the mentally disturbed — an argument that no doubt will be made during the inquest, if not necessarily by the doctors who cash Corrections checks, including a clutch from outside Ontario who fought hard to avoid being summoned, arguing that Carlisle’s power to command stopped at provincial borders. A further motion by Corrections Service to keep video segments out of the public domain — at least until jurors were seated — was abandoned in November after Public Safety Minister Vic Toews ordered lawyers to co-operate with the inquest. An earlier inquest was scrapped after the first coroner retired.

This inquest’s odyssey, two years of legal wrangling getting to this point, actually mirrors Ashley’s meandering journey in prisons across the country. In the 11 months before she choked to death with a strip of cloth tied around her neck, Ashley was shunted 17 times among nine institutions in five provinces, strapped to her seat during flights, soiling her clothes.

Her ridiculous itinerary reads thusly: Nova Institution for Women in Truro, N.S.; Joliette Institution in Quebec to the Regional Psychiatric Centre in Saskatoon; L’Institute Philippe-Pinel de Montreal to Grand Valley; St. Thomas Psychiatric Hospital in St. Thomas, Ont. to Grand Valley; Joliette Institution back to Nova Institution for Women; Central Nova Correctional Facility, back again to Nova; Grand Valley Institution to Grand River Hospital to Grand Valley Institution to St. Mary’s General Hospital in Kitchener, arriving with vital signs absent, pronounced dead at 8:09 a.m.

She stood 5-foot-7 and weighed 216 pounds. Official cause of death was ligature strangulation and positional asphyxia.

This is what became of the teenager who was adopted when just 5 days old, by outward appearances a normal kid until around age 10, when she started acting out in petty crimes and truancy, suspended from school and in youth custody by 15.

Ashley was never free again after February 2005.

Only death released her.

Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

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